Starker on 6/8/2021 at 20:47
Babylon 5 has a very rough first season. A lot of self-contained or nearly self-contained episodes, some of the worst special effects of the series (he whole series has aged very badly overall in this regard), the acting isn't quite there yet, the conflicts are only starting to get set up, there's some foreshadowing, but none of the payoff yet, etc.
The Expanse has already been much better in this regard in its first season, but then again, for me there haven't really been any special moments like in B5 where you had already started to get glimpses of brilliance.
rachel on 6/8/2021 at 23:48
For me the hardest was Holden's perpetual sad-puppy face. This guy could make Jon Snow look positively cheerful :laff::laff:
(It gets better though)
Tocky on 7/8/2021 at 03:42
Quote Posted by nicked
I'm not inherently opposed to a mixture of light-hearted quips and serious tone. I think it's just Joss Whedon's very specific style that grates on me. Something I enjoyed about the Mandalorian was how the main character doesn't make any stupid jokes. The way Joss Whedon uses humour is almost fourth-wall-breaking in its obnoxiousness. Nothing breaks my immersion quicker than a character making a joke that is clearly for the audience's benefit only.
Just tell me you got a laugh out of the almost fourth wall breaking scene where the storm troopers were shooting at the tin can in Mandalorian. I'm just glad I don't listen to anyone's opinion. I would miss some good things. It's all about the characters to me and I see a bit of myself in some, what with almost never being completely serious. One thing I liked about Firefly as opposed to Star Wars or Star Trek is that they actually got shot a lot. Nobody really does miss the way the bad guys do in Star Wars. And when they were beaten on Firefly they actually looked it. It was more gritty and realistic in some aspects. I liked how they overcame problems like having to shoot a gun from inside a space suit and with the port door open to have the oxygen to fire in space. They didn't have a magical force or super luck to fall back on. They had planning and brains enough to post a sniper.
You know what I would like to see? Remember Thom? Onion Bobs cartoon space dog? That. Only make him human and keep the corporate insensitivity and all the rest. Except Onion Bob if he had creative control would just have him die of space parasites or some pessimist ending like Brazil. I want a movie, particularly a space one, where the lead wins in such a circumstance. I want him or her (preferably both) to find a way of using the corporate crap against their handlers to escape the bondage. I need that. Make it a deep space dystopian love story. Boy in a misery of daily grind and with the company miserly chipping away at his meager existence meets girl and decides to beat the bastards and win the girl and does it. One couple against the whole of galactic corporate greed wins. Make it realistic. Make it hard. But make it so.
nicked on 7/8/2021 at 11:27
Quote Posted by Tocky
Just tell me you got a laugh out of the almost fourth wall breaking scene where the storm troopers were shooting at the tin can in Mandalorian.
That was pretty funny! But I'd argue it's only fourth-wall-breaking if you know what's being referenced. It's still a fun character beat, even if you have no Star Wars cultural frame of reference.
demagogue on 7/8/2021 at 11:48
Meanwhile in Twin Peaks, David Duchovny has joined the cast and Major Briggs's disappearance looks so much like a plot line in X-Files, you could probably sneak it into an X-Files episode without a person noticing. I remember people talking about the line from Twin Peaks to X Files, but I was thinking they were talking about inspiration. Actually watching these last few episodes, it's looking more like a spin off.
Gray on 8/8/2021 at 18:26
Quote Posted by raph
The Expanse
I would strongly recommend any sci-fi fan to watch it. I have not seen anything as good in many years. Multiple viewpoints, multiple opinions, cleverly written, well acted. Or indeed, anyone should watch it, really, just to see how there are more than one way to view a certain event.
Gray on 8/8/2021 at 18:30
Quote Posted by Tocky
I am the last science fiction nerd on the planet to watch the Firefly series I reckon.
You are not. I've watched about half of season one, because people kept telling me it's great, and I've watched Serenity, but I've not done my proper homework yet and watched the rest of Firefly. I keep meaning to, but somehow tend to forget, or am not in the mood. But I'll watch it. Good thing you reminded me of it now. Any day now.
[Edit]
It was in fact my good friend Omega on TTLG who first sent me a few episodes of Firefly, some 15-odd years ago. We'd sync them up and watch it together, and I liked it, but something else came up and I got distracted by real life. Then I forgot about it for a few years. Since then I've started re-watching it, a few times, so I've seen episodes 1-4 or 5 about half a dozen times, but not much beyond that. But I plan to.
june gloom on 16/8/2021 at 01:29
So over the past couple of weeks, one of my partners and I have watched the entirety of the Michael Myers-oriented Halloween films (skipping III, obviously.) It's been a mixed bag but I've developed a greater appreciation for slasher flicks I didn't really have before, even though I do still have my personal issues with the genre's major tropes. The original film is as close to perfection the genre gets. It's been a long 40 years since then and the franchise has changed with the times. Halloween II was fun in a slightly stupid kind of way, but also gave a rare look at the immediate aftermath of a movie like Halloween I, something we don't usually get: angry mobs, newscasters, confused cops. Bad things happen in the wake of Michael's rampage as people try to piece together what happened. We're also treated to a few twists, the minor one being a hint (only a hint, mind) of a more supernatural element to Michael that would get expanded upon by later films, and the major one being the familial relationship between Michael and protagonist Laurie Strode.
The Thorn trilogy (4, 5 and 6) I think are decent films in their own right, if we're willing to accept a somewhat disjointed attempt at aping the supernatural elements of Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street. They're worth watching for Donald Pleasance, though a young Danielle Harris in the first two really cements herself as just as an important name in the franchise as Jamie Lee Curtis. The fact that they dared to have Michael menace a small child instead of a screaming 20-something masquerading as a teenager was a good twist, and Halloween 5 in particular stands the test of time for being genuinely scary at times (I'm thinking of the car chase as well as the final sequence in the old Myers house.) The last of these films, The Curse of Michael Myers, was released several years after, in 1995, and while it's something of a mess, the producer's cut I think is watchable and is a pretty good sendoff for Pleasance, who clearly enjoyed playing Loomis. (It would be his last film released when he was alive; he has a couple of posthumous film roles, however.)
Halloween H20, meanwhile, is a late 90s slasher flick, through and through. Released in the aftermath of Scream and in a brief era of horror movies that hasn't really been replicated, for good or ill, H20 is not a smart film, but it is a welcome comeback for Curtis and feels like it would lay the groundwork for the much better alternate sequel in 2018, while also setting the precedent of eliminating some of the previous films (in this case, the Thorn Trilogy) for a new continuity. It also was the film that established Josh Hartnett as one of the biggest teen heartthrobs of the late 90s, while also giving us a cute cameo of Curtis' own mother, Janet Leigh (of Psycho fame, appropriately enough.)
It was followed up by Halloween Resurrection, which, like H20 before it, is very much of its time, but where H20 was a late 90s horror film through and through, Resurrection was part of a wave of extremely bad films in the early years of the new millennium that date themselves immediately with period fads (in this case, reality TV and pre-Youtube webcasting) and odd celebrity casting (in this case, Busta Rhymes, who at least is enjoying himself even if nobody else is.) It's an incredibly dumb film and while I wouldn't blame anyone for hating it, I can't, because it's too stupid -- and funny -- to hate. And it most certainly is not the low point for the franchise.
That comes next, with Rob Zombie's Halloween remake. Absolute, utter garbage, almost completely irredeemable. I find it hard to identify it as anything other than what I might call Midwestern Alienation: a kind of deeply pessimistic, antisocial take on characters and their environment, an exaggeration of the kind of attitudes and culture that can be found in blighted towns from Buffalo to Boise. It forges an attempt to create a psychological origin for why someone like Michael would exist, but it does this in an incredibly hamfisted way, with a cast full of unlikeable people, some of whom border on monstrous, speaking dialogue written by a man who has no idea how ordinary people, let alone women in particular, talk. What value that can be found in the film lies in the decent cinematography (which even the most uncharitable viewer can admit is not strictly limited to copying Carpenter's work,) the return of Danielle Harris as an adult (this time playing the role of Annie) and a revision of Loomis (played by Malcolm McDowell) into something of a vulture, who profits off peoples' pain while still being earnest in trying to get across the danger Michael presents. But these elements aren't really enough to save the film as a whole, which just feels like a slap in the face of the entire franchise in general and the original film in particular.
Zombie would follow up this mess with his own Halloween II, which is actually... not bad, if deeply strange. Opening with a short clip where a young Michael (played by a different child actor this time) is presented with a white toy horse by his mother, it segues into a truly terrifying hospital sequence (calling back to the original Halloween II being set mostly in a hospital) that eventually reveals itself as a dream, and we move to two years after the previous film. If absolutely nothing else, it's a realistic look into the kind of ongoing trauma someone like Laurie Strode might be struggling to work through, as well as being clear that she's not the only one. The film also generally doesn't make a lot of sense unless you're down with completely unexplained and barely-hinted-at psychic bullshit and hallucinations. The way it treats Michael's mother, who was an important character in the first film, feels mean-spirited, even if we accept it as a hallucination of Michael's after surviving getting capped in the dome at the end of the previous film.
In general, the Rob Zombie duology is just mean-spirited and unpleasant, which is par for the course for Rob Zombie, whose films run on their own internal logic where literally everyone is an awful person. That the first film was successful enough to warrant a sequel just blows my mind, and yet I can't be too surprised that Rob Zombie keeps getting to make movies, because he has a reliable audience: people who cry at Monday Night Raw.
And then, finally, we come to Halloween, the 2018 followup to the original Halloween, not to be confused with Rob Zombie's Halloween. The rundown: Everything has been thrown out except the first film, even disposing of the old Laurie-is-Michael's-Sister twist. It's revealed that Michael was indeed captured after the first film, and for forty years he's been locked up in the asylum under much heavier guard. The film begins as he is due to be transferred to another facility that generally is considered to be a deep hole you throw things into to forget them. Again the film dates itself with a pair of podcasters, attempting to get Michael and Laurie's stories for the 40th anniversary but are rebuffed both times, but it's enough to provoke Michael to escape during his transfer and immediately go on the rampage, up to and including killing a preteen boy. Laurie, for her part, has spent the last 40 years preparing for this moment; her house is a heavily armed fortress and she's more than ready to hunt Michael down and kill him for good, no matter what it means for her relationship with her family. The film is good at exploring the trauma of someone who simply cannot move on, while also showing how even someone like Michael isn't immortal, no matter how inhumanly strong he is. This version's take on Laurie also feels heavily inspired by Linda Hamilton's tough, uncompromising Sarah Connor from Terminator 2, someone who prepares to fight back instead of running away (as H20's Laurie did, faking her death and changing her name to run a private school in Northern California.) In a genre that is so thoroughly built on watching women suffer it's always nice to watch them turn the tables on their tormentors. It's a fantastic followup to the original film, sleek, brutal and masterfully directed, a love letter to the franchise as a whole (so many references to previous films, including poking fun at the whole brother-sister thing.) It strips away all the cruft this series has collected over the decades and boils it down to something very simple: a maniac with a knife is on the loose, with enough new elements to make it feel original.
In short, this is a series that has had its ups and downs, and while I do advocate for the Thorn Trilogy as decent films in their own right, it's nice to see that the franchise, after all these years, has stopped letting itself be shaped by the genre it helped create and instead returns to doing the shaping.
froghawk on 16/8/2021 at 22:17
I chose to do said marathon with Nightmare on Elm Street over a decade ago and had a real blast. Unsurprisingly, the worst film was also the reboot/remake.
Rob Zombie's films are just not good. Also, what's with his absolutely camera fixation on his wife's ass? We get it, man. You love your wife's ass.
Tocky on 16/8/2021 at 23:14
I've been watching the Dark Matter series. It started well. The crew of a spaceship awaken from stasis with no memory of who they are. Through subsequent episodes they discover who they were, mostly criminals, but do not want to go back by regaining the memories. The characters work well together and much like with Firefly they have a great camaraderie. They are forced to defend each other and grow close over the first season and into the second. Unfortunately the death of one of them after the prison episodes seems to signal a breakdown in writing and it becomes more complicated and tedious with characters changing and becoming estranged. If the death had been noble self sacrifice it could have been used to bring them closer as a crew but instead it seemed gratuitous and other things are thrown at them seemingly to show fight scenes, which also is not good writing. Eventually I lost all feeling for the characters and into the third season could easily fall asleep despite near constant fights and cliff hangers. The show lost it's heart. You can lose memory but you can't lose heart. When you do that you lose your way and no amount of complicated tech can fix that.